Part Two: No planes, no guns, no men

A man stops to read the headlines at a newsstand on the street during the Second World War.

In 1942, The Vancouver Sun defied Canada’s wartime censors by publishing shocking allegations that alarmed the city and the nation. What came next resonates to this day. An untold true story from a time of fear, hatred and danger. To read all the instalments, go to vancouversun.com/100years.

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Lew Gordon was amazed, then infuriated, by what he found at the top of The Vancouver Sun’s local front page the night of March 13, 1942.

“Under present conditions,” said the article headlined The Derelict Defence, “if the Japanese attack anywhere north of the U.S. border, British Columbia will not be defended.”

The “sickeningly true” reason, the article said, was “political and military inertia almost beyond belief” that had been “hiding itself behind a screen of censorship and propaganda.”

In a staccato delivery, writer Alan Morley reeled off increasingly outrageous claims about the state of military readiness.

He even suggested the leaders’ inertia “may sound like treason” — a hairsbreadth away from directly accusing them of an offence that carried the death penalty.

It was stunningly subversive — and exactly what Sun readers knew to expect of Morley.

The epitome of a streetwise 1940s newspaperman, Morley liked his writing “short, sweet and succinct, no deep probing of backgrounds, but fast, swift comment.” He knew of no greater pleasure than to “pin a stuffed shirt to the dissecting board with three words.”

Military leaders, continued the article, had done nothing to prepare for an attack. Morley quoted unnamed officers bemoaning the lack of resources — “no planes, no guns, no men.”

Even with censorship in place, Canada’s press was not stopped from having opinions — so long as they did not make it more difficult to fight the war. The Sun had run many articles and editorials dissecting the issues around censorship, several of them critical. But this was no usual article chafing against restraints. It went far beyond and was clearly in breach of the rules.

Gordon was embarrassed. The late home edition was all done printing and by now the full run of 80,394 copies was in the hands of readers across the city. It was too late for any intervention.

To make his stomach sink even further, the article was billed as the first in a series of 10.

Gordon wasn’t used to having his authority undermined. He had become the arbiter of good taste and responsible reporting, such as when shipwrecked mariner Anton Peterson told his story of survival to a reporter from the tabloid News Herald.

Peterson’s Vancouver-bound ship was sunk by a Japanese submarine off Hawaii on Dec. 9, 1941. For 38 days he and other survivors drifted in a shrapnel-ridden lifeboat. Their store of biscuits, vitamins and canned milk soon ran out.

So they ate one of the passengers.

U.S. press reports had covered the tale of survival but gave no inkling of cannibalism. Recuperating in a Vancouver hospital months later, Peterson agreed to talk to the News Herald. The reporter teased out the cannibal angle and was about to go big with the scoop when Lew Gordon stepped in.

“I decided that the reference to cannibalism was very much out of order,” reported Gordon. The paper agreed and readers never saw the grisly angle.

The Derelict Defence was different. In this case, The Sun had pulled a fast one by not submitting for censor approval an article when common sense should have told them otherwise.

Gordon would be at his desk early the next morning, even though it was Saturday.

In Victoria, regional leaders wrapped up a meeting about how to get maximum benefit from the new Alaska Highway.

A massive influx of men and machinery was streaming into northern B.C. to build the continent’s biggest project since the Panama Canal. The road would become an essential supply line for U.S. military airfields in the north Pacific.

For Canada, the highway had geopolitical significance few could yet foresee. It would surface again significantly in the story of The Derelict Defence.

Prime Minister Mackenzie King turned to a letter he received that morning from Vancouver businessman Eliott Jacks, proprietor of Flash-A-Call Intercommunication Systems.

In it, Jacks related how, for four nights, in a row he had dreamed of King on a balcony, holding a key and flanked by flaming buildings. Jacks felt he knew what the dream meant and urged King to “Remain calm. Make contact. Ask and ye shall receive. More later.”

The stranger’s letter was instantly engaging. (Unusual as it may sound, King’s legendary interest in the occult led him to take time away from leading a nation at war to read his junk mail.) King wrote a lengthy reply playing on the mystical associations and, for weeks, he would obsess about the dream and its meaning.

A nightmare of a very different kind was erupting in Vancouver. As with the mysterious burning buildings, the entreaty to “Ask and ye shall receive” could not have been more apt.